Believe in UFOs? This editorial's for you!

During the 60's when I was in high school my friends and I formed a rocketry club. We had several night launches that were loaded with chemicals that exploded with bright flashes. We also perpetrated several UFO hoaxes involving surplus weather balloons and road hazard flares. Memories from a misspent youth.

In the early 60s three high school friends and I were into model rocketry. We built several multi stage rockets that had payloads of explosive chemicals, usually Potassium chlorate, powdered sugar, gun powder and magnesium dust. These were all chemicals that we (kids) could buy at the drug store.We launched these rockets at night in the summer and they lit up the sky briefly when they exploded.We also bought surplus weather balloons that we filled with Hydrogen and connected together with fine wire. soda straws on the wire maintained the spacing and formation. We spay painted them silver and hung road flares about 10 feet below each balloon.The balloons accounted for 2 UFO sightings in our area.There is not a single documented shred of physical evidence of alien visitation. The U.S. government couldn't keep contact a secret any better than they keep any other secrets. Does anyone believe Trump could keep his mouth shut about that?

US Government Says UFOs are “Real”
An Analysis of the 60 Minutes Investigation

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The segment opens with an interview with a familiar character, Luis Elizondo, reputedly the former head of a $22 million program instigated by Senator Harry Reid called AATIP: the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Ostensibly this was created to study possible future developments in aerospace. Elizondo claims the program was actually created to study UFOs (or, as they prefer to call them now, UAPs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.) Put out to tender in 2008, the budget was awarded to Harry Reid’s friend, Robert Bigelow, a UFO and paranormal enthusiast.

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Elizondo opens with the startling claim that “the Government has already stated for the record that [UFOs] are real.” Startling, that is, until you remember that “UFO” does not necessarily mean alien visitors, but rather something unidentified in the sky, something about which the observer lacks sufficient information to identify. Obviously, the government would admit such things are “real.” A mylar balloon floating into the range of a Navy jet’s camera is “real”, but the U in UFO and UAP does not mean extraterrestrial, or even necessarily an aerial technology beyond any known physics and aerodynamics.

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We then are shown a series of familiar videos as evidence of this amazing technology—all of which have been in the public domain for some time (over a decade in one case) and all of which have been analyzed (by several people, myself included) and found to almost certainly not represent objects exhibiting incredible abilities, and instead more likely signify very ordinary human technology.

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First, we see “Go Fast”, a video presented as showing an incredibly fast craft skimming low over the ocean. But if you do the very simple trigonometry invited by the numbers on screen, it turns out to be something far above the surface and moving at a speed that matches the wind at that altitude, making it almost certainly just a balloon. Yet the 60 Minutes host, the highly respected journalist Bill Whitaker, repeats Elizondo’s baseless claim that it’s “fast moving.”

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It looks like 60 Minutes' journalistic skepticism was lacking.

If you mean the Piltdown Hoax, who's obsessing over it? It was exposed a ling time ago. Into Piltdown?

I have no clue what you are talking about. "the Roswell/Piltman mold"? I tried googling it and got nothing useful. Still no clue. What does creationism have to do with UFOs? And what does Piltman Man have to do with anything? Once again, are you talking about Piltdown Man and what does that have to do with UFOs?I cannot understand a single idea you are trying to communicate. I'm beginning to think you are messing with me.

You have an uncanny knack for trying to connect completely disconnected subjects to make some sort of obscure point that completely alludes me. What Piltdown firestorm? "Now we have creationism making hay out of the P Man hoax" What are you talking about? Who are you talking about? Who are uncritical minded UFO skeptics and what do you want them to investigate? Are they qualified to investigate whatever you want investigated? Wait, are these skeptics trying to prove that UFOs are extraterrestrial or that they are imaginary?Why don't you just tell us the "pseudo scientific nature of their approach"? I'm sorry, but I still don't understand the problem. What unscientific techniques are you talking about? How is scientific enquiry prevented.and why is it prevented?

Oh, OK, now I get it.

Sure, conspiracy theorist who doesn't know jackshit about science or bugfuck about evidence. There's always need for more wine. To me, too. A total failure to communicate.

Oh, you're have another senior monument.

The Pentagon’s UFOs
How a Multimedia Entertainment Company Created a UFO News Story

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On December 16, 2017, the New York Times published “Glowing Auras and Black Money—The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” a now-famous article about the previously unknown Pentagon UFO study program, as reported by To The Stars Academy (TTSA). It was founded by a rock musician named Tom DeLonge, formerly of the band Blink-182, who describes TTSA as an “independent multimedia entertainment company.” This set off a media UFO frenzy that still continues.

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Most people didn’t notice that Leslie Kean, one of the authors of this piece, is a dedicated UFO promoter who has written a popular UFO book. She is also very gullible, at one point promoting a video of a fly buzzing around as if it were some great proof of high-performance UFOs. (And she still has not admitted that she was fooled by the fly.) Another author of the article, Ralph Blumenthal, has also been a UFO believer for years. So this was not the customary news article written by New York Times journalists assigned to investigate a mystery and write an objective story. Instead, it was crafted by UFO believers to appear neutral and objective when it is anything but.

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Now the other shoe has dropped. On May 26, 2019 the New York Times carried another article by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean—the same three authors as the earlier piece—headlined “Wow, what is that?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects.” They write:

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The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds. “These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years.

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One seriously wonders why, if unknown objects were supposedly seen “almost daily” for nearly a year, and hung around “all day,” we don’t have overwhelming video, photographic, and instrumental evidence of them, removing all doubt about their appearance and behavior? In reality, all we see are the same three blurry infrared videos promoted by TTSA, over and over again. This makes no sense at all. Doesn’t the Navy have any cameras, radar and other surveillance equipment?

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The Pentagon did not “disclose” or “release” anything about UFOs. This whole “disclosure” line came about from statements by TTSA’s Luis Elizondo and others, and not from any internal Pentagon activity. The Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) came about because multimillionaire investor (and longtime UFO believer) Robert Bigelow, a frequent campaign contributor to Sen. Harry Reid, prevailed upon Reid, then the Democratic leader in the Senate, to set up the AATIP program. AATIP then funneled $22 million in contracts to Bigelow’s company (because that’s how things are done in Washington). The only thing that AATIP is known to have produced are 38 papers in weird physics, like anti-gravity, wormholes, and negative mass propulsion.

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TTSA has claimed from its inception that the Pentagon released the three blurry infrared videos that they ceaselessly show us. They claim to have “chain of custody” documentation for the videos, but nobody has ever seen this documentation. Elizondo recently released to George Knapp, a reporter friendly to TTSA (and it seems to anybody else making UFO claims) a copy of a document purporting to show the videos’ release. But a careful analysis by John Greenewald of The Black Vault shows beyond any doubt that the document does not prove what Elizondo claims it does. Greenewald notes,
we have no proof of any [official Pentagon] release, let alone what is being touted [the videos] is even the same evidence connected to this DD Form 1910. If we see a blatant disregard for the truth by Mr. Elizondo on display with this DD Form 1910, and we see the same disregard for the truth by To The Stars Academy as they have touted documents proving a public release—how can we believe everything or anything else from the same sources?

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One recent development that is significant, and is not mentioned on the program or by TTSA: According to an article in The Drive by Joseph Trevithick and Tyler Rogoway:

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the Times’ story doesn’t mention that between 2014 and 2015, Graves and Accoin, and all the other personnel assigned to Carrier Air Wing One (CVW-1) and the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, as well as everyone else in the associated carrier strike group, or CSG, were taking part in series of particularly significant exercises. The carrier had only returned to the fleet after major four-year-long overhaul, also known as a Refueling and Complex Overhaul (RCOH), in August 2013. This process included installing various upgrades, such as systems associated with the latest operational iteration of the Navy’s Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) and its embedded Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIFC-CA) architecture. This is a critical detail. When the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group encountered the Tic Tac in 2004, it was in the midst of the first ever CSG-level operations of the initial iteration of the CEC.

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In other words, in 2004 the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group got its radar upgrade, and soon was reporting “unidentified objects”, including the Tic Tac. In 2014-15, Carrier Air Wing One got its radar upgrade, and soon they, too, were reporting UFOs galore. One could interpret this to mean that the radars had finally gotten powerful enough to detect the UFOs that had long been knocking about. But a more prudent interpretation is that the radars had gotten powerful enough to begin detecting birds, small balloons, insect clouds, ice crystals, windborne debris, and various other things found in the atmosphere. Arguing in favor of the latter interpretation is that these radars are apparently no longer detecting anomalous objects, which itself is extremely significant. It suggests that, in all likelihood, after being puzzled by anomalous objects appearing on the new radar, the operators finally figured out what was happening, and no longer are troubled by anomalies.

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And in a last-minute bombshell, reporter Keith Kloor finally did what reporters are supposed to do, and ask tough questions about persons in the news making claims. Writing in The Intercept on June 1, Kloor’s piece is headlined “The Media loves the UFO expert who says he worked for an obscure Pentagon program. Did he?” Kloor writes…

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there is one crucial detail missing from “Unidentified,” as well as from all the many stories that have quoted Elizondo since he outed himself nearly two years ago to a wide-eyed news media: There is no discernible evidence that he ever worked for a government UFO program, much less led one.

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Yes, AATIP existed, and it “did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena,” Pentagon spokesperson Christopher Sherwood told me. However, he added: “Mr. Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked in OUSDI [the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence], up until the time he resigned effective 10/4/2017.”

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That directly contradicts an email sent by a spokesperson for To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, a UFO research and entertainment company that Elizondo joined after he left the Defense Department.

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So, it looks like the so-called evidence in the 60 Minutes episode were complete bullshit, not released by the Pentagon at all, but instead by the UFO nuts. And the guy, Elizondo, doesn't work for the Pentagon or AATIP, let alone manage it.

Yep, it's just UFOlogists making stuff up.Us: Where's the evidence?UFOlogists: The Pentagon has it.The Pentagon: